


Dark Magic

by moreless



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Blood and Gore, Cannibalism, Dark Magic, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, F/M, Human Sacrifice, Huxloween 2020, Murder, Trans Armitage Hux, Trans Female Character, Violence, no beta we die like meh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:14:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27070285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moreless/pseuds/moreless
Summary: The house already smells faintly like blood when Kylo steps across the threshold. A frisson of dread runs through him, hairs on his arms standing on end. Hux has started early. She’d told him she’d wait.Fill for Huxloween 2020, promptdark magic.
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 1
Kudos: 56
Collections: Huxloween 2020





	Dark Magic

The house already smells faintly like blood when Kylo steps across the threshold. A frisson of dread runs through him, hairs on his arms standing on end. Hux has started early. She’d told him she’d wait.

He closes the door, locks it behind him, and in a sudden bout of paranoia checks it again and again, rattling the knob to make sure it doesn’t budge, sliding the deadbolt back and forth, back and forth. The door, when he finally steps back from it, remains shut. There is a salt pot Hux has hidden in the umbrella stand; he retrieves that and pours a line before the door and now, at last, Kylo feels his anxiety abate somewhat.

In the meantime the tang of metal has filled the entire room, and Kylo looks up at the ceiling as he climbs the stairs, almost expecting to see blood dripping through. It’s just mould and water stains. There’s a puddle of blood though at the foot of the attic ladder, blood smeared on the rungs, and on the lip of entrance, already coagulating into a tiny morbid uvula, the entrance to the attic a mouth ready to swallow him whole.

Kylo swallows, puts his hands on the tacky rungs and climbs in.

“You’re late,” says Hux. Her voice is muffled, her head stuck in her sweater. It’s the one she’d stolen from him, the cream one with the loose weave, and it seems to have gotten stuck to one of her earrings. Kylo hurries over to help, extracting the eight legs of a tacky Halloween bauble from the wool. “Thank you,” she says, pressing a kiss to the curve of his jaw, before tossing the sweater aside. It, too, is stained with blood, soaked through enough that it has left red smears against Hux’s side and over the tops of her still small breasts. It goes festively well with the Halloween bralette she has on, the one with the grinning pumpkin pasties over her nipples.

“Is it done?”

“No, not yet. At least you’re in time for the main event.”

As if on cue, Brendol Hux groans from where he lies trussed up in the middle of the pentagram. Hux, because she can be incredibly fucking extra when she wants to be, has spraypainted it in the middle of the attic in metallic gold paint. 

“What do you think?” she asks.

Kylo walks over to the bound man. Hux hasn’t gone easy on the zipties; Brendol’s fingers are already turning blue. Blood still oozes from a fairly large cut on his head, staining his white hair red again, plastering it flat against his skull. Like this, Kylo can see the resemblance between the two Huxes, though it’d been a long time since _his_ Hux has worn her hair that way.

Brendol looks concussed, but he recognises Kylo immediately, and starts wriggling and spitting against his gag. Kylo glances nervously over to Hux. She’s at her altar, grinding together something in a mortar and singing softly under her breath.

“You should probably hurry.”

Brendol’s struggling connects his head with Kylo’s boot. He looks down and regrets it instantly. The bastard has Hux’s eyes--or more like, Hux has the bastard’s eyes, and it makes Kylo’s stomach turn. He quickly walks away, but not before giving the man a solid kick in the ribs, feeling something at least crack beneath the toe of his boot. Brendol screams behind his gag. Hux looks up at him, beaming. “Feels good, doesn’t it?”

“You should still hurry,” Kylo says. He doesn’t trust Brendol and nothing about this will sit right until the man is dead.

“Patience,” Hux tells him. “Can’t half-arse this.”

No, they can’t, but every second Hux stretches this out is a second closer to discovery and second closer to this all falling apart. It frustrates him that she’d planned out every part of getting the sacrifice--how to incorporate Brendol into the summoning, when to do it, how to catch him unawares and yet this part, the witchcraft bits, where Kylo’s absolutely useless to help, she leaves for last minute.

Hux seems to sense his restlessness. She pats him on the hand, accidentally smearing something dark and oily across his skin. “Why don’t you sit down,” she says. “I couldn’t prepare this ahead because it has to be done in the very hour. It’s only a few more minutes. If you’re worried, there’s the crowbar over there.” She jerks her head to one corner of the attic, and indeed, there is a crowbar thrown carelessly aside, one end already crusting with blood and bits of skin and hair.

Grimacing in distaste, Kylo picks up by the clean end and walks over to the old armchair pushed up against one slanted wall. It’s far enough from Brendol to keep him out of reach, but close enough that if he has to, all he’ll need to do is stand and club him over the head.

The worn springs squeak under his ass as he sits down, and the smell of dust fills his nose. It makes him realise how long it’s been since Hux had last brought him up here. When they’d been sixteen, and Hux had just come out to him, only for Brendol to climb in and find them curled up together in this very armchair. She’d disappeared then for a year, only to return with her hair shorn, padded with extra muscle yet more awkward and gangly than ever.

Kylo glances back to the altar, where Hux putters around her jars and mixing bowls, still singing softly, and he can’t tell if it’s a song or a spell or both. She’d lost the muscle, and hormones have softened the line of her jaw, though her cheekbones remain as sharp as ever. The hair she’d grown out too, still short, something between a pixie cut and an incredibly asymmetrical bob. She’s fucking gorgeous, and Kylo’s so lucky to have her back.

“Fuck you,” he growls at the bound man at his feet. “I’m looking forward to this.” This has been in the works for months, but he’s sure Hux has been dreaming about this for years, maybe even in the womb, sharp, angry, deadly. Her mother’s curse upon the house of Hux.

Brendol keeps struggling angrily, grunting against his gag. Kylo watches him gnaw on it, trying to work it down his jaw, break it with his teeth, but the knot is fast. Hux has done a good job. Of course she has, nothing ever gets past Hux.

The clock ticks closer towards midnight. Past Brendol’s grunting and the rhythm grind of mortar and pestle, and Hux’s low hum, Kylo can hear the insects buzzing outside. The overgrown lawn is full cicadas. A fox cries out in the distance.

Kylo taps the crowbar against the steel capped toe of his boot. Brendol has stopped struggling. His eyes are closed, and Kylo would think him dead if it weren’t for the shallow rise and fall of his chest.

Ten minutes to midnight, and Hux finally stops singing. “I’m ready,” she says. Brendol’s eyes snap open and Kylo gives his bonds another cautionary once-over before he rises to his feet and walks over to Hux. 

“Need any help?” he asks.

“It’s fine.”

She’s already anointed herself with the herbal paste she’s spent the last half-hour grinding down, the mixture gleaming almost bloodlike on her brow, over her lip, on the backs of her hands. “Oh wait, no, help me here,” and she tips her head back so that he can draw a line in paste down her throat, disappearing down her shallow cleavage.

“Nothing on the back?” he asks, wiping his hands on a towel.

“Nah.” Hux shakes her head. “Now for him.” She nods at Brendol. Her father has managed to wriggle around and watches them, watery eyes wide with fear. He looks like one of the deer he’d taught Hux to hunt, but no dead creature Kylo has ever seen has looked this pathetic.

As Hux rounds the table, carrying the heavy mortar and pestle in hand, he begins to struggle again, bucking and heaving until he’s half rolled out of the pentagram. Grinning viciously, Hux gets down her implements, then gives Brendol a kick in the side with her heavy boots. A shout bursts past the gag, and Kylo instinctively looks over to the attic trapdoor, though the chances that anyone would’ve heard that is slim.

“You should probably stop struggling,” Hux suggests, as casually as she might ask her father to pass the salt. “Make it easier on yourself.”

If looks could kill, Hux and Kylo would both be dead. Brendol kicks out when Hux grabs him by the ankles to drag him back into the pentagram, but for all that she’s let that lean, muscled look go, Hux is deceptively strong, and she’s driven by two decades of hate. She’d already dragged him through the house and up the attic stairs for the sacrifice. This is nothing to her.

Kylo still remains close, rearranging the candles Brendol has managed to scatter. This is the critical moment. Anything might happen. He’s here to make sure it all works out.

A snap of Hux fingers light the candles around the pentagram, and then she goes to work. There’s little finesse about it. It’s nothing like in the movies, or whatever Kylo has expected, no chanting, no last words. Hux doesn’t pin Brendol down spread-eagle, doesn’t straddle him to slit his throat like in those revenge slasher flicks they’d watch all the time, Hux's eyes always intent on the scene like she’s taking notes.

None of that. Instead she grinds the stained pestle down on Brendol’s forehead, until she breaks skin, blooding mixing with the paste and running to join the rest of the smeared puddles on the floor. Kylo helps her rip open his shirt, baring Brendol’s heaving chest, his middle paunchy and pale and sparsely haired. Hux looks her father in the eyes, gives him a nod. Kylo can’t tell if this is supposed to be a small mercy, a sign to brace himself, or some other kind of acknowledgement between them. Whatever it is, it makes Brendol close his eyes and turn away. 

And then Hux guts him, sternum to navel. For all that he’s steeled himself for this, Kylo’s stomach turns. The attic immediately fills with the smell of blood and shit, the large hunting knife tearing apart Brendol’s intestines on the way down. Hux wiped it down on his mostly still clean pant leg, then starts to pry the breastbone away, breaking through the ribs to get at the heart. Kylo’s eyes flick up to Brendol’s face which has gone slack. Dead or unconscious. His heart still beats, and Kylo can see, pumping feebly away under the gleaming whiteness of bone and gristle and slippery fat.

Bones crack as Hux pries them back and Kylo jumps, and finds that he suddenly has to sit down. Blood has spread past the boundaries of the pentagram, almost to the toes of his boots and he jerks back, falling into the stuffy old armchair. He pulls his legs up.

Hux has gotten to the heart. She severs the aorta and a gout of blood gushes forth, washing over her hands, almost erasing the runes she has painted there.

“There you are,” she murmurs. She briefly looks up to meet Kylo’s eye, and gives him a reassuring smile. Kylo doesn’t feel reassured. 

He turns away when she pulls it free, pulling his hoodie over his head and hiding his face in his knees. His jeans smell of mud, faint traces of detergent, skin, but under all that, the cloying pervasive iron of blood, blood, blood. Without his sight he hears it now too, as Hux’s teeth sink into the soft organ, the way it squishes in her mouth, the thick heavy drops of blood pattering down to the floor.

 _Squish squish_ goes Brendol’s heart in Hux’s mouth. Kylo has eaten offal before, and he hates the iron rich taste of it, the strange texture of heart, of kidney, of liver, no matter how it’s been prepared. But Hux loves it, and will eat it from Kylo’s plate whenever offered. It’s what he thinks of now, the smell of red wine and onions and liver. Grimacing as he kisses the taste from Hux’s lips. She finds his squeamishness funny.

Light flashes, and Kylo jumps at the sudden unexpected roll of thunder. He looks up just in time to see Hux rip off a piece of heart with her teeth. The candles have gone out, and her eyes look black in the dim light. Kylo risks a glance over at Brendol’s corpse and almost gags. It looks like weeks of rot have set in early. The face is sunken, caved in its hollows, the eyes jelly in their sockets. Chest and belly have caved in, the putrid flesh and skin clinging to the exposed skeleton. Only the heart in Hux’s hands looks fresh, and though Kylo is sure it’s only a trick of the light, that it’s just the hollow ventricles giving in her grip, it almost appears to be beating.

Kylo keeps his eyes on that. He can’t seem to move from where he is, curled up in the old armchair, nails digging into the armrests. Something seems to have stuck him fast, forcing him to bear witness to this ritual, to this sacrifice. As Hux keeps eating, the body next to her progresses further into decay, until finally the last piece of gristle disappears between her teeth and what is left of Brendol dissolves into a filthy stain on the wooden floor.

Hux swallows, closes her eyes. She looks a little ill. Kylo remains frozen, can’t even rise to help as she drops to her hands and retches like she’s about to hurl--and she can’t hurl, the spell can only work if the consumption is total and complete, and Hux wouldn’t tell him the potential consequences of her failure.

He tries to say something comforting, encouraging, something, _anything_ , but his tongue is stuck behind his teeth and he can only watch as Hux’s shoulders shake and twitch, listen helplessly as she keens between clenched teeth.

Then she sits back on her haunches, inhales sharply, and belches. “Oh god,” she says, and now finally Kylo can move. He drops to his knees beside her and throws his arms around her, uncaring that he’s probably kneeling on what’s left of the elder Hux, though he’ll probably want to burn his jeans after tonight.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” she reassures him, patting his back. She smells like iron and cloying herbs. The blood smeared across her chin, neck and chest stick her to his shirt and she peels herself away with a faint tearing noise. “Let me clean this up.”

Kylo nods. “Is it done?”

“Yes,” says Hux slowly. She runs her across her bloodstained teeth. “I do believe so.”

As she wipes herself down, Kylo gathers up the candles and contemplains the stain within the pentagram. They could probably cover it up with a nice rug. Paint over it. They have to make sure none of it leaked through the ceiling.

“How convenient,” says Hux, joining him in his contemplation. She’s wiped away most of the blood, and rinsed out her mouth, though her lips remain red-stained and her breath a little fetid. Is it just him, or do her canines look a little sharper?

“We’ve done it, Kylo,” she breathes, wrapping an arm around his waist, pulling him closer. Kylo lets himself be reeled in, still tacky with Brendol’s blood, still feeling slightly numb. His hands, he notes as he strokes them down Hux’s lightly freckled shoulders, are shaking. Her eyes, he realises right before they flutter shut, are no longer human.

Her tongue is rough against his lips. When she kisses him she has too many teeth.

**Author's Note:**

> 2000 odd words just to get to the last two lines hmmm


End file.
